Fey Victus
by pygmalion
Summary: Michael locks horns with Luci down on Anagura at the end of a mutilated timeline. Because you know he would. Rated for language and gore.


** Fey Victus   
**

* * *

Michael, Luce, Anagura, background information and everything else from the Japanese comic series 'Angel Sanctuary' except for this fictional piece itself is copyright Kaori Yuki and publishers. This piece is by a fan, for the fans. Well, that and English 2. But. We won't get into that.   
Warnings: Blood. Violence. Bad language. OOC characters, I think. This fic doesn't fit into anywhere in the manga timeline, I think. It's weird. Because I haven't got the translations for the ending, and have failed to coerce anyone into explaining it to me.   
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    It wasn't an awesomely unusual phenomenon for Michael to cry, though it was by no means something he engaged in on a regular basis. He didn't avoid it out of some puerile instinct of adhesion to masculine stereotypes because people adhered to masculine stereotypes in order to present some sort of infinitely stupid _façade_ to the world at large, something _fake_ to disguise weakness from the omnipresent wolves who watched subtly from the background always prepared to pounce on it, and Michael was not an angel given to weakness. Nor did he answer to anyone, least of all 'the world at large' full of its leering wolves and the hypothetical judgement behind their yellow eyes. He expected everyone to watch and obey _his_ every whim, make allowances for what fits he chose to throw and remain exempt from criticism. This, he accomplished easily enough: death by fire was an unpleasant way to end a debate with an archangel. 

    God had stopped watching a long time ago. He was gone. Murdered, actually, by the Messiah who had saved all of Creation from His wrath, and then forsaken it as well. The divine government had been left to rot off its hinges, internally chewed apart by inter-factional dispute, and various other breeds of political rubbish that Michael did not care to dignify with his attention. Not that, even at the peak of His reign, even the mad Creator had inspired much more than a petty grunt about _the bureaucracy_ from the archangel. 

    Nowadays, Michael no longer cared. No one ordered war on a plate anymore, and thus, nobody required him _to_ care. With the exception of the occasional cringing amateur in uniform, some so-called champion of nearly defunct idealists (perhaps vying for human rights? hah), everyone had long given up attempting to ally themselves with the great Michael or his armies, powerful as they could have been. This new kind of warfare was done over conference tables. Or, alternatively, over microphones and ear-pieces and liquid crystal screens and way too much distance. All the action Michael saw happened when he went down to Anagura now and then, the upper levels of Hell, and worked off a little stress snap-kicking demon heads in halves. 

    The eerie white Anaguran sun threw a long dark shadow over blood pooled with mud like rain, flooding Michael's meager 5'4" frame in darkness. The archangel's fingers twitched on the handle of his huge sword, irritation rapidly translated into pyrokinesis, dancing in snapping yellow sparks behind acid green eyes, over the tips of quilled black-red hair and the sweeping pinions of ice white wings. He _hated_ to be reminded of his height. People fucking _died_ when he was reminded of his height. Everyone knew that, so _WHO WANTED TO DIE?!_

    Michael whirled over the sludgy turf, and promptly froze. Feathers. Black feathers. 

    They fell like fat black drops of velvet rain. 

    "Quit shedding on my Goddamn warzone." His voice grated out, almost a snarl, only just not quite that unintelligible, pale fingers twitching spasmodically on the heavy weapon's hilt. "And prepare to _die_, you little _shit_." 

    It had never mattered in terms of combat that Lucifer was more than a foot taller than him. They shared no resemblance except for basic anatomical similarities and facial tattoos, and even there in the former all the protraction had been stolen from the tiny redhead's frame, wrapped up in sleek, hard muscle and an additional two wings to the more ubiquitous pair that Michael possessed, and generously bequeathed to Lucifer. 

    King of Hell. It sounded pretty damn impressive, no pun intended, and even more intimidating. 

    People tended to forget that Michael fucking _put_ him there. 

    Then again, most found it difficult to keep their wits about themselves around the dark angel. He was impossibly beautiful to look at, not like the word could even begin to describe him. Sometime during the Renaissance era, Lucifer had even breached the six and a half foot height of Uriel, the scapegoat angel of Death. He towered over the world at large - including his hapless younger twin - too careless in his narcissistic self-absorption to seem _consciously_ cruel in his utter lack of _giving a shit_ about others, a distance from society that put him well above its pathetic sense of justice, never mind the eager little droves of his worshipers enslaved to it. Flesh like pearls withstood the rays of divine sunlight eternal as well as they did Michael's scorching flames, smooth over his broad shoulders, whipcord torso and long limbs. Despite his height, Lucifer was too perfectly proportioned to ever be as lanky as Uriel, though naturally, his strength had nothing to do with lean, cleanly hewn musculature. 

    Yet the serene cut of his face, small, straight nose, full mouth, wicked pale green eyes framed in sable, and the fine structure of cheeks and jaw lent him an ethereal, vaguely androgynous cast. That ambiguous beauty turned the masculine power of the rest of him to _something_ that both masked and suited what he was. His black hair had always been kept rather long, and with the aeons, its ragged edges had begun to feather out longer still against his pale cheekbones in the front, the rest growing to taper out inkily over his shoulders. Like the massive four part wingspan rooted into his shoulders and back, the obsidian fibers of his hair also acquired faint silver-gray highlights when struck by light, like those of breaking winter dawn or colder steel. 

    Across one eye, he had acquired the tattoo of a stylized flame, inked right after Michael had gotten the winged serpent branded on his skin from left cheek to chest, in what was originally some awkward attempt to look all grown up, and suited him far better now. Michael's was a symbol -- or measure of manhood, procured prematurely, but grown into, a signature as foolish as it was bitter, as bitter as it was proud. Lucifer's showed like he was permanently weeping black fire in the wake of his little brother's dawning maturity. The irony probably just _killed_ him. 

    Lucifer was all of that, and too much more. Even charisma and genocide aside. Pity Michael had only inherited the talent for the latter, from constantly watching him from the sidelines, craving his big brother's regard. 

    The most _pitiful_ thing about the tattoos was that Michael had been _so_ desperately _flattered_. 

    Honed alloy screamed against alloy, broad blade spitting sparks out over the long black claws that trapped it for the moments it took for Lucifer to say, "We're in Hell, little one: it's _mine_." 

    His breath didn't smell like anything, blowing over the smaller angel's face exactly like the breeze of where they were. Michael's, on the other hand, stank like blood, and his overbright golden eyes blazed with the same sick fever that possessed the eerie white-hot orb of the Anaguran sun. His lips curled back from his teeth briefly, flashing gummy pink as he snarled, "I'm going to _kill_ you." 

    He tried to brush off the sinking suspicion that Lucifer had forgotten his name. Hence the amazingly gay dub of endearment. 

    Instead, he concentrated on getting his far taller twin off the gradually tightening backward bend of his spine, ignoring the startling sizzle of pain at the base of his back, nerves beginning to squeal - 

    They broke apart with a squelch of rubber over bloody turf and a wild whirl of ragged black cloth, travelling cloaks that swathing each from shoulder to boot toes. Michael shed his with a violent backward fling of his arm, heavy sword singing perfect figure eights from the slim fingers of his other arm. Satisfaction drew a closed smile painfully tight like cutting wire around his face, until he felt like his teeth would tear through his lips. Lucifer lunged, the long black claws molding into a winking C-shaped scythe to meet the blade that whipped down, only to bounce disconcertingly right off the slender tip of the crescent curve. 

    "Do you remember that day I went down to Hell with everyone?" 

    "I fucking _blew_ your ass _down_ to Hell and tonight I'll have your fucking _shit_ and _blood_ on my fucking toothbrush." 

    The muscles in Michael's shoulders contracted involuntarily, sinews in his inner wrist pushing a mile out under thin white skin as he brought the sword across again. There was a beautiful chink! as the tip of Lucifer's scythe broke off, a dark, slender triangle that shimmered under the gaseous sun and then plowed deep into the dark angel's flawlessly smooth cheek. Only to be reabsorbed into the dark angel's flesh instantly as an excruciating spike of pain erupted from Michael's wrist, screaming up the length of his entire arm. Tendons, ligaments and bones that had withstood the tons behind massive beasts of Hell splintered like strips of balsawood, the joint of the archangel's elbow breaking, reversing and forcing itself neatly through scarred skin. 

    "Sou ka, sou ka... So that's why your breath stinks. Oh what," the dark-haired angel's head canted slightly to the side, a gentle breeze riffling through long, midnight pinions. Since he had refrained from removing his cloak, the wind did a little twilight dervish with that, and gave overlong eyelashes a gentle congratulatory flutter as well. "Haven't had enough? 

    "Ne? I can't hear you." 

    The underside of Michael's boot crashed into the sword blade half-drowned in blood at his feet, forcing the slimy hilt to whip up into the spasming grip of his only functioning hand. Some time passed before he could speak coherently because the sinews of his jaw were inconveniently gritting and slacking in time with the irregular twitch of his head on his neck, jerking the slender rattail braid at the base of his skull from side to side like the tail of a nervous cat. Despite that he rolled his eyelids back until he went half-blind and it felt like they would get stuck to the backs of his eye sockets, it was difficult to keep the malevolent figure of his twin within his field of view. Brilliant that Lucifer was just standing there, again, whining away like an _ass_. God but his other arm _hurt_ like a bitch. "I said I'd kill you dead, cut out your eyes, piss in the empty holes of your fu-!" 

    It felt like his ribcage had flattened to paper. 

    Then it felt like he was spinning off into deep space. Plus oxygen deficiency. 

    He left the ground in a symphony of snapping bone, eyes bulging out of a head slung forward while he traced his backward flight with a glimmering ribbon of saliva through the air. The bloody ground hurled up to meet his back with an insulting thump and growl of finality. A lie, of course: his meager weight bounced and spun more than once before he ended up flat on his face, incidentally inhaling desperate lungfuls of blood instead of air, with his sword somehow still gripped in hand while the ravaged boot-shaped crater burned on his chest against the ground. 

    "Does it feel bad to be the lesser half of someone?" Lucifer inquired distantly, voice soft, cold and clear despite the high whistle of breeze around them. 

    An indignant protest was choked off with the beginnings of a scream, scream slewn before it even exited Michael's throat and replaced by a pathetic, wet gurgle. Even while he thrashed on the ground, the bones beneath white skin stretched to its limits began to shift: shattered fragments within his torso were swimming and coalescing between skewered meat in automatic reparation. Only Lucifer's boot had touched him, after all, and that apparently hadn't been crafted from the dark angel's own flesh. The fire angel's legs kicked aimlessly - _twitched_ more than kicked, slender musculature jumping against bones seemingly of its own accord while his arms slid out from under him in his repeated efforts to stand up. Neither callused palms nor steel-tipped boot toes were able to find purchase in the swamp that painted his lifted face in oozing crimson. 

    "Like some bizarre side effect that just sort of _happened?_" Lucifer's head tilted slightly, nearly white irises and stark black pupils half-shaded by lowered eyelashes. His face was as bleached white as bone, deepened and yet undiminished by the shadows that the brilliant white sunlight lined his features with. "Leftovers?" 

    Ironically, he looked as dead as Michael appeared alive. 

    The black angel was suddenly so close that the whispering hem of his cloak threw ripples into blood that washed over the archangel's straining calves. The sleek black scythe had been remolded back into one long arm tipped with sprawling talons, as unblemished and perfect as the rest of him. 

    Beautiful. 

    "Expendable?" 

    In the midst of a battleground littered with the hewn limbs of seemingly mass-produced demonic minions, the suggestion was far from funny. 

    His answer was the sound of Michael getting to his feet, white shins muddied and bloodied like those of an errant child. Moist scrabbling was punctuated with unconscious grunts of pain: no doubt the archangel would have smothered them - for some infinitely insipid reason - if he could have. 

    The fire archangel's arm looked like a mess, dangling uselessly from a compromised shoulder joint, connected to a snapped collarbone. The twisted wreckage of his crumpled hand dripped orange blood silent and viscous into the dark crimson sea that belonged to their silent audience of scattered body parts. A veritable inferno raged on behind gilded irises, pupils contracted into insignificant pinpricks of black. The beginnings of conjured fire flickered like crimson lightning along the wide blade of the sword clung weakly to in Michael's usable hand, and brightening flames hissed like extra scarlet strands among the red-black tips of his hair. His tattooed face was stretched beyond taut into a grimace that had nothing to do with physical pain, harsh breathing ripping noisily through pink-rimmed nostrils. 

    "Hm." It was scarcely audible, and half as interested. Eyes colored frosted jade seemed to stare right through intensifying orbs of gold, exertion-trigged gleam flattening and fading into nonexistence. Fire, white and green lanced through by blue within a swirling collision of gold and scarlet flared a ragged nimbus around the enraged archangel as his brother just _stood_ there, unmoved as the face of eternity, a perfect reflection in monochrome floating on lakes of blood that did not congeal. The breeze picked up to feed the impending firestorm. Lucifer slid a single pale fingertip into the soft, dark hair behind the ivory curve of his ear, idly flipping a sable lock over his shoulder. 

    "Don't expect me to repeat the favor _this_ time, but I let you win." 

* * * * * 

    The sun never set on Anagura: it glared down from a featureless sky just as colorless and almost as pale, intruding into firegold eyes through ragged eyelashes somehow left untouched. The ground was parched, ashen and ashy. Michael couldn't breathe. The ruin of his arm was stretched out beside him, but he barely felt it: _everything_ seemed far away, even the charred black skin interrupted with blisters and oozing burn sores that covered his almost naked body. Rubber shorts had been melted into his skin, fishnet shirt along and blood that had once pooled inches deep on the ground had been vaporized with the incredible heat the archangel of fire had summoned to his purposes. 

    _He didn't beat me. He didn't_ win. _Oh God no. Oh_ fuck no. 

    It would kill him if Lucifer won, and not in such insignificant matters as pulse and neural activity. That stupidly simple admission could bring him to his knees and unravel his psyche until he was the quivering child surrounded by blossoming flame, that lost boy everyone had been _scared shitless_ of on that fateful day after he had sent his elder brother to Hell. Except for Raphael, who Michael would've _sworn_ didn't know _anything_ about _anything_ bar the minute details of porn - if he hadn't put Michael back together again. 

    _"He's only won if you think he has. He'll only win if you let him."_

    Perhaps ironically, it would also kill him if Lucifer had let _him_ win. He refused to believe it was out of some inane sense of pride, because pride was for the _weak_, some idiotic side-development in the sense of self that stemmed from the belief that one's abilities could be measured and simply measured above everyone else's. 

    Right? 

    Lucifer just didn't _see_ anyone else. He looked at them through expressionless pale green eyes, and despite carefully maintained pretenses otherwise, he did _notice_ people. He _knew_ their glaring weaknesses and their strengths, although he had a charming habit of selecting only the former for proclamation. None were impervious to the untouchable angel, not the ones who loved him and wanted him, not even the only one who didn't. He noticed everything everyone else didn't have the courage to notice, and he said everything nobody else had the balls to say. Whenever he damn well wanted to. Yet this was only because nothing concerned him enough to make him afraid: he was neither capable of feeling fear enough to run screaming like a coward, nor did he thwart the necessary evil that distinguished the brave. Such were virtues tested and celebrated through the ages, boasted by few yet personified beneath the guise of borderline insanity by the archangel Michael himself. Michael was as prone to and capable of foul tongue, and snubbing the powerful as Lucifer was. 

    In the face of total indifference, it didn't mean a single damn thing. 

    Except that he was afraid. 

    Just like everyone else. 

    But that didn't mean he _was_ weak, like all of them, was he? He couldn't possibly be victimized by all the multitude of retarded, egotistical little trials and phobias and wants and needs that made them as insignificant -- as _expendable_ as they were. Lucifer couldn't have possibly _meant_ it when... 

    _Damn it,_ NO. He couldn't start thinking like that. _Never_ again. 

    Here, there was no one to see his tears. Even if there had been, Michael was the fucking General of Heaven's Army for God's sake, _not_ subject to the assessment of the proverbial ghosts of those who had opposed him, or the rumors that ran rife among those who worked beneath him. He most certainly did _not_ require a stamp of approval from some stupid _twin_ that he'd effectively kicked out of Heaven some billion or so years ago. He was the ass-kicking archangel _Michael_ of _war_ and _fire_, feared throughout _Heaven_ and _Hell_ and -- just check the books -- Earth _too_. 

    So fuck that. 

    Michael's throat constricted, choking on bile and something that felt like meat and tasted like blood. The tears burned slimy tracks into burnt cheeks, hot even against baked skin before he wiped them away with a few greasy layers of scorched flesh. As breath barely caught and held in the back of his throat, he gradually forced the stiffening contours of his face to sneer back at the glowing white sun. 

    "Victory never tasted so fucking _sweet_." 


End file.
